Mass Effect 3, Gears of War 3, and Why Reviewers Fail

Dave Thier
, ContributorI write about video games and technology.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Mass Effect 3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s a common theme amongst fans angry about the ending to Mass Effect 3. None of them seem to believe the reviews, and they’re wondering the same thing: how is it that virtually no professional writers made a mention of what many fans saw as a glaring, inescapable, game-crippling flaw in the ending?

Something seems to be clear here – there’s something wrong in games reviewing. Some have blamed money or advertising dollars, but I don’t think that’s the root problem. The big problem is less sinister than that, though no less dangerous. We just really like games. And we want to like games.

Look at the score system from IGN – Google’s de facto champion of game reviewing. Never mind that reviewing any piece of art out of 100 is a ridiculous endeavor, but look at the actual scores. The vast majority of popular games fall somewhere between 8 and 10, and a competently executed blockbuster will almost never score below a 9.0. The tacit message being sent here is that most of this stuff is awesome, it’s just a question of how awesome it is.

Critics are unpopular people. They take other people’s artistic babies, things that people have worked years perfecting, and they rip them to pieces. The best tend to still be impossibly arrogant, but sharp enough that they’re hard to disagree with. Game critics, however, delve into that territory very rarely. We tend to be quick to forgive, quick to see things from the developer’s point of view, and quick to hope for improvements in the sequel.

For a case study, we’ll zoom into Gears of War 3, and the realm of subjective opinion. I thought this game was terrible. When I played Gears of War 3, I saw a slick shooter with a responsive engine appropriate to a long-honed blockbuster series. I also saw an utterly boring title devoid of soul or style, embarrassingly marred by ham-handed attempts at emotional dreck.

Here’s the subtitle for IGN’s Gears of War 3 review: “Does Gears of War 3 live up to the hype? Duh. Of course it does. Let's chainsaw some fools!”

Hard-hitting stuff.

When it came to the narrative and writing, features of the game Epic had clearly tried to focus on, reviewers either praised it or found some way to say that it didn’t matter. Here’s Gamespot: “Gears of War 3 delivers some truly poignant moments and boasts some of the best storytelling ever seen in a shooter.”

I guess that was that reviewer’s opinion. But it seems like there were some rose-colored glasses being worn there. It’s the sort of hyperbolic language that shows up all the time in game reviews. It’s the kind of thing written by people who really want games to be great.

It isn’t that I require every reviewer out there to agree with me. But the near universal acclaim surrounding Gears of War 3 just seemed perplexing – am I so weird that pretty much nobody out there even came close to agreeing with me? Is everyone that I talked to about the game so weird that pretty much nobody else out there even came close to agreeing with them?